Why Indigenous stewards are bringing ‘good fire’ back to Canada’s forests

Spring comes to Leona Antoine’s field in patches. The snow retreats from the Nicola River valley, leaving islands of wet grass scattered across her family’s land.

It’s an invitation to carry on a practice she first learned from her grandfather.

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Antoine, who is Syilx and Nlaka’pamux, remembers her grandfather’s joy when he would drop a match and watch a low, patchy fire creep across the field. The fire would clear away dead brush, allowing sunlight to reach the ground. Nutrients would get recycled back to the soil. Within weeks, fresh green grass would shoot up alongside huckleberries and other traditional medicines, she said.

Antoine, a former forest firefighter and forestry consultant living in Merritt, B.C., calls it “good fire.”

Her grandfather came of age when Indigenous communities were largely outlawed from applying it. Now, decades of aggressive forest fire suppression and climate-fuelled extreme weather have left Canada’s forests primed to burn.

Her field, hemmed in by a highway and crossed by the Trans Mountain pipeline, is part of British Columbia’s increasingly flammable southern interior. Towns like Lytton and Summerland have become shorthand for recent megafires. Antoine says her grandson’s first home was a hotel room after his family was twice displaced by out-of-control blazes over the last five years, the most intense stretch of B.C. wildfire seasons on record.

“We keep reacting to these catastrophic fires,” Antoine said. “How can we restore our practices and our teachings and our culture into the future, where we’re actually restoring our ecosystems, where it’s sustainable?”

What Antoine is doing in the Nicola Valley is part of a movement among Indigenous fire practitioners and researchers to put strategic, controlled burns back on the land, outside peak wildfire season. Those low-intensity fires not only protect communities by clearing dead debris and depriving future out-of-control fires of fuel, practitioners say, but they cultivate healthier landscapes and put Indigenous people back at the centre of land stewardship.

“Mother Nature is already making up our minds for us,” said Antoine, chair of the Salish Firekeepers Society, a non-profit advocating for Indigenous cultural burns and land stewardship practices.

That movement appears to be gaining momentum. A recent Senate report on Canada’s “escalating wildfire crisis” highlighted cultural burning and recommended the federal government boost financial and logistical support for Indigenous-led fire management.

In Ontario, the province recently relaxed legislation making it so Indigenous communities no longer have to apply for a fire permit for cultural burns if the provincial ministry is notified in advance. Several provincial wildfire agencies, including B.C.’s, publicly support the practice.

A recent study out of northern Australia linked a decline in the extent and severity of bush fires to Indigenous-led controlled burns. Another study out of Stanford University linked controlled burns to a roughly 16 per cent drop in fire intensity and a 14 per cent drop in smoke emissions.

Yet, fighting fire with fire is one of the most underused wildfire mitigation tools in Canada, lagging far behind in use compared to the United States.

Wildfire agencies in Canada set prescribed fires on about 110 square kilometres this past year, mostly in B.C., according to a report from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. While that was the highest annual total of the past decade, it still pales in comparison to the United States, where the federal Forest Service alone routinely oversees prescribed fires on thousands of square kilometres of land each year.

Amy Cardinal Christianson, a former research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, attributes Canada’s hesitation partly to a risk-averse culture driven by liability fears and historical accidents where prescribed fires burned out of hand.

Canada directs far more resources to fighting wildfires than it does preventing them. But a “fire put out is just a fire deferred,” said Christianson, who is Cree-Metis from northern Alberta.

What if more money spent on fighting wildfires supported Indigenous fire guardians, people knowledgeable about their own culture and territories, with reliable funding and training to safely steward the land year-round?

“Those are the people that can make those decisions about where the fires need to happen that will be most impactful for their communities,” said Christianson, who left the forest service and pursued more direct advocacy for Indigenous fire stewardship.

“It’s so much more than just a tool because it’s so connected to who we are as people and that important relationship and responsibility we have just for land stewardship.”

THE CHALLENGE TO REVIVE CULTURAL BURNS

Daylan Chookomolin didn’t plan to work fighting forest fires. In 2018, he was working at a youth program in Weenusk First Nation when he noticed a smoke column rising above the community to the north. He followed it, “to be nosy,” and soon found himself running supply errands and working the hose line, he said.

Standing near a crown fire for the first time, seeing a wall of flames and listening to it roar like a jet engine, inspired fascination, not fear, he said.

Growing up, Chookomolin says he remembers how people in the community, just south of Hudson Bay in northern Ontario, would burn their lawns every spring before conditions “greened up.” He figured at the time it was just a bit of lawn care and only later recognized it as something more deeply rooted.

Reviving those cultural burns on a larger scale is an uphill battle for Chookomolin. Now, as the community’s fire management co-ordinator, he trains and manages a 15-person volunteer crew. When they’re not battling fires in and around their own community, they’re helping out on fires elsewhere, leaving little capacity for preparing large-scale burn plans, he said.

“We have capacity issues. We don’t have a very large staff, and our spring seasons are usually busy and then we only have a certain window when we can do these burns,” Chookomolin said in an August interview, during what was Ontario’s worst wildfire season on record.

At the same time, the community is “losing a lot of elders that have the knowledge” about how those burns were practised, he said. Climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, is rapidly warming the north, lengthening the fire season and drying out the peatlands, leaving Chookomolin with questions about how to safely carry out the burns on an altered landscape.

For help, he turned to Thunderbird Collective, a group bringing together Indigenous fire practitioners from across the country to strategize and share knowledge about cultural burns.

“I would like to see one day where, yes, we can suppress the bad fires we don’t want, but we can also be the reason for these good fires,” said Chookomolin, a member of the collective’s steering committee.

“We can be the ones controlling fire, starting these little burns to help the forest rejuvenate and to kind of help mitigate fire risk at the same time.”

‘A SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUE’

Chookomolin’s experience mirrors several of the barriers identified by Christianson and facing Indigenous communities across the country. Cultural burning is still largely barred in most of Canada outside of Ontario and the approval of burn plans requires time and resources many Indigenous communities don’t have, said Christianson, now the director of fire stewardship at the Indigenous Leadership Initiative.

As fighting fire with fire gains more attention, Christianson says she worries governments will shift to mostly prescribed fires, keeping the power with wildfire agencies, and overlooking Indigenous-led cultural burns. Those burns, she says, are primarily about achieving community-driven “cultural objectives,” not only wildfire mitigation.

“We feel there’s a social justice issue as well,” she said.

Fire is integral to Canada’s forests. Charred wood recycles nutrients into soil, fresh grasslands provide for grazing elk and hunting badgers, and hollowed logs offer woodpeckers a place to nest. The cones of jack pine require fire’s extreme heat to melt its waxy coating and release its seeds.

Many Indigenous communities understood those relationships and sought to replace unpredictable fires with low-intensity controlled burns, Christianson said. Archeological evidence from one of the oldest Indigenous settlements on the continent, near Sturgeon Lake First Nation, points to controlled burns dating back 11,000 years.

As early as 1610 in Newfoundland, and later spreading across Canada, governments pursued a policy of near-total fire suppression and outlawed Indigenous burning practices. As fires receded, timber regions were filled in by thick stands of pine and spruce prized by foresters, pushing out more fire-resilient aspen and birch and swallowing up meadows and grasslands.

Parts of Canada’s forest are now in a fire deficit. Despite recent record-breaking seasons, many regions are burning far less than they did in the past, a peer-reviewed study co-authored last year by federal research scientists found. When a fire is lit, there’s more wood and debris to feed it. Add in climate-fuelled extreme weather and you have some of the key ingredients for a new era of severe, ecosystem-destroying megafires.

That risk is disproportionately shouldered by Indigenous communities. While Indigenous people make up about five per cent of the population, their communities account for 42 per cent of wildfire-related evacuations.

“Indigenous people are repeatedly kept out of decision-making about forest and fire management in their own territories, yet have to experience the effects over and over again,” Christianson said.

In the Nicola Valley, Antoine, the chair of the Salish Firekeepers, said she sees signs of change.

In an interview this summer, she said the province and industry had started to collaborate more meaningfully on land management, pointing to an Indigenous-led program to plant native species along the watershed. After B.C. relaxed fire legislation in 2023, the wildfire service has partnered with several First Nations on cultural burns.

Last spring, Antoine said she handed the torch to her 16-year-old daughter, the same age she was when she first started setting fires alongside her grandfather. Watching her daughter put fire to the field inspired in her a sense of pride and continuity, she said.

“I think our ancestors are smiling and I think that, you know, we’re starting to take our rightful place, and it feels good as a steward to be able to apply fire and be able to pass it on to the next generation,” she said.

“I think if we heal the land, the land will heal us.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2026.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press